I am using Vector Linux 5.9 Gold. I am having difficulty with connecting to my wireless router. The router is a Netopia 3347NWG and the wireless adapter is a Linksys WUSB 200 Wireless-G Business USB Network Adapter. The encryption in use is WEP 128-bit. I have read the HowTo: Configure your Wireless Network. I am using ndiswrapper because I could not find which chip the device is using.

The output of lsusb was: Bus 1 Device 2: ID 13b1:0028 Linksys

but there was no information from Google about this ID number.

I have got as far as Vector talking to the wireless card and finding a number of wireless access points in the neighbourhood, including my own. When I use wifi Radar, it typically finds five wireless access points and all but mine have the router symbol (to the left of the SSID) covered by a question mark. I take this to indicate that some sort of connection has been established. But the message at the bottom of wifi Radar is "connected to None ip(none)" when I try using DHCP or "connected to None ip(192.168.1.80)" when I assign myself a fixed ip address. I have carefully entered the 26-character encryption key more than once. I have tried "Doing it Old School" as per the HowTo, wifi Radar and vlwifi but none enable me to get so far as to ping the router and get a reply.

One thing that I have noticed is that ifplugd does not seem to start on boot-up. When I enter ifconfig after booting up, all I get is:

The access point to which I want to connect is "eircom1122 4510". I tried entering:

iwconfig wlan0 essid "eircom1122 4510"

I got no errors but when I keyed iwconfig wlan0 again, the essid had not changed - it remained at off/any. I have also tried to change the mode to managed:

iwconfig wlan0 mode managed

...but mode stays at Auto. I have only been able to enter the channel and the key. I am still not been able to associate the network adapter with the access point. For what it's worth, here is the output of iwconfig wlan0:

I disabled encryption on the wireless router and connected without any difficulty. After switching off encryption and booting into Vector, I opened Wifi Radar and saw that a connection had been established between the router and my computer but that the computer had no ip address. I clicked on "connect" and and immediately acquired an ip address. I opened a browser and was able to browse webpages.

So now that I know that Vector can connect me to so an unsecured router, how can I get it to work with encryption switced on? In the HowTo: Configure your Wireless Network it says that "Configuring your interface to use WEP is nearly as easy as when using an open network." But this has not been my experience. Connecting to an open network was very easy indeed but connecting to a WEP-protected network, to which I have a key, has proved impossible so far!

I can't help with WEP. I can say that we're using WPA here with a TrendNet wireless router. I didn't need to go to the command line at all. I connected with vwifi on the first go. It was every bit as easy as an open network other than having to specify the encryption and enter a password. wifi-radar works as well. Does your router support WPA?

The router supports WPA-802.1x and WPA-PSK. However, there are other people using the same router as their access point as well and I'd have to change the configuration of their computers to work with WPA if I wanted to switch over to WPA. I don't really want to do that because they are happy with the way things are. WEP works fine with their machines so I'd rather leave well enough alone.